


make it better

by resistate



Series: Martingales [2]
Category: Canadian Ice Dancing RPF, Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Alcohol, Carmen-era, Christmas, Domesticty, F/M, Friendship, Light Angst, Softness, brief mentions of chronic pain, brief mentions of dieting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-30
Updated: 2019-05-30
Packaged: 2020-03-30 01:56:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19032388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/resistate/pseuds/resistate
Summary: If Tessa’s being honest with herself, sex with Scott matches the mood of their short dance this season more than it does their free dance. (Carmen-era, but happier.)





	make it better

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sonni89](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sonni89/gifts).



> Sonni89, your Yuletide fic was supposed to be five things but I ran out of time and wrote you just the one thing in the end. I decided later to turn your gift into a series and here, finally, is the second part. I hope you enjoy it! 
> 
> This fic was also inspired by the throwback fic challenge for VM writers, yay!
> 
> Huge, huge thanks to ariel and úna for beta reading and reassurance and being excellent :DDD
> 
> This fic can be read on its own or as a sequel to [we see by christmas lights](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17040776).

//

2012

In early December Scott passes her an honest-to-god note, a sheet of lined paper folded into a tight triangle, like he’s a girl and they’re in elementary school instead of one of the hallways at Arctic Edge.

They’d agreed a couple of years ago to stop exchanging birthday and Christmas gifts, opting instead for spontaneity. Scott gives her the odd greeting card that he thinks she’ll find funny or pretty or inspirational, but mostly what he gives her is notes. They’re written on identical sheets of paper: same three holes punched in the margin; same rows of blue lines crossed through once in red, like they’d all come from the same notebook. Like he’d maybe bought a notebook especially to write Tessa notes. There’s usually nothing much in the notes except reminders to himself about things they want to work on for their programmes, things Scott’s written down for his own benefit that he’s sharing with Tessa; or things he’s seen that he thinks Tessa would like to know about. He’s usually right. Tessa definitely wants to know, for example, that Bob Evans is selling candy cane hot chocolate now that it’s the season again.

She keeps Scott’s cards and notes in a box under her bed in Canton, mixed in with Christmas and birthday cards from her parents and her brothers and Jordan. The box is rich yellow pine and was made for her by her grandfather when she was little. Tessa remembers sitting beside him in his workshop while he’d carefully painted a black ‘T’ in cursive on the bottom left-hand corner of the lid. She’d been quiet on the outside and bursting with excitement on the inside, waiting impatiently for the stain to dry so she could take it home; so it could be something that was just hers and not Casey’s or Kevin’s or Jordan’s. She doesn’t take Scott’s notes out later and look at them or anything, just adds them to the box as she receives them, one by one.

Tessa waits until she’s in bed with a mug of chamomile tea before she reads Scott’s latest note, just in case. She’s got a novel on her bedside table she’ll probably read two pages of before she passes out from exhaustion. Meryl and Charlie had beaten them at the Grand Prix Final last week and she and Scott have a lot of work to do between now and Nationals next month. Plus there’s Four Continents to be looking ahead to, and Worlds, and next season is an Olympic season; their last one. She slides her fingernail under the edge of Scott’s triangle and carefully unfolds the familiar sheet of lined paper.

Sure enough, she feels a flush seeping into her cheeks even though all that Scott’s written is, _Christmas is on a Tuesday this year—any thoughts on how we could celebrate?_ Underneath he’s sketched a face of a man with short, slightly wavy, dark hair. One eye winks up at Tessa. It’s supposed to be Scott, she guesses. She laughs, the sound bright and loud in her small, quiet bedroom. She digs her phone out of her purse and taps out a message to Scott. _I may have some ideas._

//

They have five whole days off the ice over Christmas; a luxury they won’t have next year. She and Scott message back and forth, hashing out complications with their respective schedules, and arrange for Scott to spend the night of December 24th at Tessa’s house in London. He’s going to come over after the family dinner his brother Charlie is hosting and leave before Tessa heads to her parents’ for breakfast and present opening. She’s told her family she wants to wake up in her own house on Christmas Day, for once.

She hasn’t told her family about her arrangement with Scott because there’s not really anything to tell. She and Scott have been sleeping with each other regularly for a couple of months now, ever since Scott had told her he and Jess had split up for good and Tessa had told herself it didn’t have to jeopardise their partnership if they kept it casual. They’d started up at the beginning of the season; around the time they were making the transition from developing their programmes to practicing and competing their programmes. A change in routine in more ways than one had seemed called for, and really, there are a lot of reasons it makes sense. They’d decided it was a way to blow off steam (Scott, but Tessa agreed) and no one’s business but their own (Tessa, but Scott agreed).

It makes sense to sleep together when they’re performing Carmen; when it gives them a competitive edge. Though if Tessa’s being honest with herself, sex with Scott matches the mood of their short dance this season more than it does their free dance. Sex with Scott is effortless. It’s joyous and sweet and well, _companionable_ is probably a strange word to use, but she stands by it. In her head, anyway; they don’t really talk about what they’re doing in the abstract; only in the specific. _I like it when you do that; I don’t like it when you do that; do you like it when I do this; is this okay?_ She’s always faintly surprised that they don’t already just _know_ without having to talk about it what the other likes and wants and needs in bed. They’re good at figuring it out as they go along though, and Tessa loves that. She’s proud of that. She wonders sometimes if her pleasure in the way she and Scott are getting along spills over into their free dance. Carmen is tense; it’s fraught with messy, unexpressed, even repressed, emotion, but she thinks the characters they’re portraying wouldn’t do what they’re doing if they weren’t enjoying at least some of it, and Scott agrees. They’d loved working on Carmen over the summer and they’re continuing to have a lot of fun with it; it’s one of their favourite programmes they’ve done. She can see why Marina insisted; why she hadn’t let up until she and Scott had finally agreed to skate to it.

Tessa realises now that she was scared that the intensity of the source material would be too much to handle. She and Scott know they have a tendency to push themselves hard, to commit to the point of regret. Tessa’s thinking about her legs, of course, which even now, after all the work she and Scott have put in to move differently, more efficiently, rarely let her forget they exist; that they’re something to be reckoned with. That she is. And they’d won gold at the last Olympics, despite Tessa’s pain, so really, how much is there to regret? She adds the strength and conditioning exercises Bruce had given them to her next day’s mental to-do list. Guilt settles in her stomach. They probably haven’t been doing them as often as they should this season. They’ve been working hard, though; they always do. They’ve been spending most of December re-working their short dance, not content to cling blindly to something that clearly isn’t working. They’ve been spending a decent amount of time with each other when they’re not training. Sex is a way to work on their connection without overdoing it at the gym or on the ice.

Or maybe, she thinks, one day just before they break for Christmas, that’s not it at all. They’re on the ice, practicing one of the spins from their free dance, the one that sits between their twizzles and their circular step sequence. Tessa’s character pushes Scott’s character away, but then they’re clasping hands, and then Scott is clasping Tessa’s waist as they spin, heads together, for all the world like they’re telling each other secrets; and then Tessa, distracted, forgets to move away like she should; and then Scott’s retreating into the safety of her neck so that no one else will see how ragged his breaths have become; and then when they finally move into their step sequence, Scott’s fingers dig into her waist far harder than they need to; and maybe, she thinks, pretending to have sex day in and day out had broken Scott same way it had broken Tessa. Maybe he couldn’t go another day without fulfilling every promise they make on the ice. Maybe some part of him needs the way they need each other to be real.

 She doesn’t know, and she can’t really ask.

//

On Christmas Eve Tessa buys a few springs of mistletoe at the farmer’s market with Scott in mind, because he loves the holidays as much as she does, and keeps them tucked away with the rest of her shopping while she and Midori join friends afterwards for drinks. She wonders sometimes if her career is worth it; worth the strain it puts on all her relationships with her friends; her family; even with Scott. Of course, her relationship with Scott can’t be separated from skating. She wouldn’t want it to be separated from skating. She looks around the table at school friends who are in town with their partners over Christmas and thinks, _I’m not terrible at this_. She comes home with a small stack of cards to add to the box under her bed in Canton.

She’s sitting at her kitchen table wrapping last-minute gifts when the doorbell rings. It’s Scott, and she can’t help the grin she feels blossoming, even though she knew it was going to be him; even though she’s seen him as recently as yesterday when he’d dropped by to return one of the textbooks she’d left in his car by accident. She wishes she could forget about university over the break, but that was never a realistic plan. She’s taking a break today, though. Today has been a good day, and it’s only going to get better. She greets Scott and hugs him and when she finally pulls away, he’s looking at her with an odd expression on his face, like she’s maybe suggested that possibly, just possibly, the ISU isn’t corrupt. Tessa would never, and to prove her point she pokes him gently in the chest with the hardcover she’d picked up this afternoon for Jordan. She’d been worried, suddenly, that what she’d already bought and wrapped for everyone wasn’t going to be good enough, so she’d gone to Chapters in the afternoon to pick up more gifts. It was a good thing she’d already booked a car to take her home; she’d wound up buying far more today than she’d planned. Browsing the shelves for books for her family had been relaxing, even with the crowds. It had been kind of festive, in fact, and it had been nice, in a way, to blend in, to be just another last-minute Christmas shopper.

Scott’s still standing in her hallway looking at her oddly, and the ISU is never going to give them back the ten points that got knocked off their short dance at Skate Canada, and Tessa has no idea what’s going on. ‘What?’

She takes Scott’s coat and hangs it in her closet. He follows her back to her kitchen, a bottle of wine in hand. She glances at it and away, but not quickly enough for Scott not to have noticed. ‘It’s just wine,’ he says, ‘it’s not a gift or anything like that.’ Tessa’s heart flips over in her chest for some stupid reason, but surely Scott can’t see that.

Scott sets the bottle of wine—it’s a red, Tessa’s preference—on the counter. ‘Seriously, though, what?’ she asks again.

Scott shrugs and picks up one of the presents Tessa’s already wrapped, turning it over in his hands. ‘I don’t know, I guess you just look—happy, I guess.’

Tessa makes a face. ‘Have I been that miserable? I know this season’s been a lot but—’

‘—No, you’ve been fine, I just—you look nice,’ he says.

Tessa’s exchanged her heels for slippers, but she hasn’t changed out of her dress. It’s red and sleeveless with a plunging neckline. She’d been wearing it earlier with a fitted cardigan as a concession to the weather and the occasion. Now the cardigan hangs carefully over the back of one of the chairs in her kitchen. She’s taken off her earrings and loosed her hair from its knot, and she would have changed into something different and more comfortable except she’d thought Scott might appreciate her dress. This isn’t a date, Scott being here, because they aren’t dating, but it’s not exactly not a date. They’re going to have sex later, probably, and they’d arranged already that Scott would stay the night.

‘Oh, well, thanks,’ Tessa says. The way Scott can’t seem to take his eyes off her makes her feel exposed and she wishes, fleetingly, that she had changed. ‘You look nice, too.’ Scott’s wearing trousers instead of jeans or sweats and an honest-to-god sweater, one she’s never seen before. It has a subtle reindeer motif at the collar and cuffs. It brings out the colour of his eyes.

One of Scott’s best friends was promoted to Assistant Manager of an LCBO in Strathroy in the fall and a knock-on effect, Tessa’s finding, is that Scott is a lot more knowledgeable about wine that he ever used to be. He’s brought them a full-bodied merlot that he says should do well with dark chocolate. She prefers the taste of milk chocolate, but she knows that Scott knows she buys dark chocolate because she’s less likely to eat the entire bar in one sitting. She unearths two wine glasses while Scott rummages in her cutlery drawer for a corkscrew. She’s owned this house for more than two years and she hasn’t yet had a proper Christmas here. She hasn’t done much entertaining at all. In two years, when she’s retired, she’ll make a start. In two years, when she’s twenty-five. It’s exciting. Exciting, and mildly terrifying.

Scott agrees to help her wrap the rest of her presents for tomorrow, which consists mostly of Tessa wrapping presents while Scott reads the backs of the books she’s picked out for her family and makes hilarious predictions about their contents. Tessa thinks they’re hilarious, anyway. She fills in one final gift tag and affixes it to a coffee table book about golf courses for her father. According to Scott the book had started out being about golf courses but had taken a sudden and unexpected turn into being about Atlantis, since Atlantis had probably had a golf course, right? Didn’t everywhere have at least one golf course? And once the photographer had gone to the— what was the name for places in Atlantis? ( _Atlantians_ , Tessa had supplied solemnly) —Atlantian golf course it naturally had been game over for any terrestrial golf courses. Scott had insisted that exploring Atlantis was where it was at. Tessa smiles, still carried away on their earlier flight of fancy, and then Scott’s picking up her hand, gently, and kissing the inside of her wrist, and all the way up the inside of her arm, and then he’s kissing her on the mouth, just as gently. Tessa’s too startled to do anything, but then Scott’s pulling away, and Tessa distracts herself from the needy, embarrassing noises she finally realises she’s making by pulling him in and kissing him back.

They break apart, eventually, for air. Tessa busies herself gathering the leftover wrapping paper and Scotch tape and gift tags. ‘What was that for?’ she asks. She bought way too many gift tags this year; she’s good for the next five years, now. All she and Scott are doing is sitting at her kitchen table. They haven’t even made it to Tessa’s bedroom yet.

Scott shrugs. ‘I guess I just wanted to.’ Out of the corner of her eye Tessa can see his fingers playing with the beadwork on the cardigan that’s slung over the back of the chair next where he’s sitting. Tessa hopes he’s not worried, but she thinks he might be.

‘Is that—is it okay?’ Scott asks. Tessa tries to catch his eye, but he’s examining the candy canes, tiny beads of red and white, on her cardigan.

‘I kissed you back,’ Tessa points out. So that Scott knows for sure, she adds, ‘Yeah, it’s okay.’

She puts all the wrapping paraphernalia into one of her shopping bags, separating out the gift tags that aren’t too Christmassy. She can recycle them for Scott. His cards and gifts are random, but Tessa’s aren’t. Twice a month seems reasonable, like she cares (she does; of course she does) but not like she’s trying too hard (she wonders what the point is, sometimes, if she’s not going all in). When she’s done packing everything away, she notices that Scott’s glass is empty. When she asks him if he wants more, he shakes his head. ‘I want to remember everything about tonight,’ he says.

It sounds like such a _line_ that Tessa almost laughs. She doesn’t, because Scott’s not laughing. He’s not even smiling, until he is, so sudden and so soft that she wonders if he’s not a little drunk already. Her stomach dips like she’s on a roller coaster. Tessa loves roller coasters, but her stomach doesn’t, and Tessa doesn’t like feeling like she does now: like part of her has gone on ahead and the rest is struggling to catch up.

‘I’m not that memorable,’ Tessa says, or starts to say, because it’s true and because she needs to say something, but then Scott’s kissing her again, tentatively and then, when Tessa responds, insistently. His hands are on her hips, backing her into her kitchen counter, and then on her breasts, the friction of his thumbs on her dress making her nipples harden and her breath stutter. Tessa winds her fingers through Scott’s hair and feels his heart beat against hers and lets the subject drop.

They stay up far later than they usually do, taking advantage. They’re not too tired from practice; they don’t have practice the next day; they’re not sharing rooms with other people; there’s nowhere either of them needs to be. Scott’s almost always the first to fall asleep, and tonight is no different. His face softens in sleep, tension seeping from his forehead and his jaw. In sleep, he looks uncomplicated. They’ve been working this month, she and Scott, to uncomplicate their short dance. It’s not just the judges who don’t love the programme; she and Scott have struggled all season to connect with Marina’s vision, with the characters she wants them to play. Tessa’s not lost; she could never be, not with Scott here. They haven’t just met; they’ve lived in each other’s pockets for years. It’s scary pushing back against Marina, especially with Igor gone and along with him the stability they’d felt last season. Marina’s been unmoveable on the changes Tessa and Scott want to make to the free dance—and that was another reason Tessa had resisted Carmen for so long; what’s even the point of taking on a warhorse if she and Scott can’t make it irrevocably their own—but maybe they can work this to their advantage. Maybe they can use Marina’s immovability about their free dance to negotiate more changes to their short dance.

They could bulldoze the characterisations that aren’t Tessa and Scott and build in characterisations that are. Scott’s not in love with Tessa any more than she’s in love with Scott, but they can play two people who are. They can play two people who enjoy each other’s company while dancing to beautiful music. They can portray the reality of an established relationship; the history; the ebbs and flows. She thinks that if the elements that frame the pattern are like the ebb of the short dance, the tide draining away from the shore, then the Yankee Polka is the flow, the incoming phase where she and Scott rise again. Expected, but not any less joyous for it. She knows that a lot of skaters complain about the pattern, but Tessa loves that it’s rigorous and complicated. She loves that getting it right is another way she and Scott can separate themselves from their competition. Scott jokes that this year’s pattern gives Meryl and Charlie an unfair advantage, and it’s not as funny as it could be, considering.

At least they have the Finnstep to look forward to. It’s another quickstep, this one invented by a Finnish ice dance team. Tessa had done some research on next season’s pattern back in the spring when it had first been announced. Rahkamo and Kokko had gotten married after they’d retired. Tessa looks up at her ceiling and wonders what that would be like; wonders how well passion and affection and commitment would translate off the ice. Marie and Patrice seem happy, but then Marie and Patrice have always been outliers. They’re two of the most exceptional people she knows, and Tessa—Tessa is working on self-acceptance. Tessa, she tells herself, is doing the best she can. She gets up to get a glass of water, hoping that moving her body will have the knock-on effect of moving her thoughts in a more useful direction. When she climbs back into bed, Scott stirs. She watches his eyes blink open, a tiny, adorable frown creasing his forehead. He looks up at her and his frown deepens.

‘Tess? Is it morning?’

‘Ha ha,’ says Tessa. ‘You’re hilarious.’

Scott’s chest is shaking in appreciation of his own stupid joke. He’s not wearing a shirt, and Tessa can appreciate that, at least. Scott’s laughter isn’t contagious, not at two o’clock in the morning, but she gives up on not smiling and reaches down to smooth his hair off his forehead. He catches her hand when she starts to move away and keeps hold of it. He looks past Tessa, at the clock on her bedside table, and she sees that the tiny crease between his eyes is back. She wants to reach over and smooth his forehead with her thumb until all his worries are scrubbed away. She settles for shuffling closer to him, her bare thigh pressing against Scott’s upper arm. Scott’s looking at her when she stops moving, checking in.

‘I’m okay,’ she says. ‘I’ve just been thinking about our short dance.’

‘Ah,’ Scott says. He traces the veins on the inside on her wrist with the pad of his thumb. ‘Finnstep?’ he offers. It’s become one of their key words as they’ve worked to improve their programmes. Fuck the Americans. Fuck this season’s short dance. Fuck everything except next season, the season that counts; Tessa and Scott’s season.

Tessa laughs and shakes her head. She takes Scott’s hand in hers and squeezes gently.

‘Oh, that’s okay then,’ he says.

The little crease has disappeared from Scott’s forehead. Tessa is absurdly pleased that it’s gone; that she did that. ‘Yeah?’

‘You have good ideas,’ Scott says.

Tessa slides down the bed until she’s lying beside Scott. He pulls her against him, and she explains how they can make their short dance better by continuing to simplify it, by stripping away everything until they’re left with just the two of them; with their story. Scott asks questions and makes suggestions, but mostly he listens. He listens while Tessa rambles excitedly and he keeps listening while she organises her thoughts. Scott’s as enamoured of the changes as Tessa and they both work on articulating the case they’ll take to Marina. It’s easy to bounce ideas and arguments off Scott; it’s easy to just keep saying words to him until they unjumble themselves and start making sense. It’s easy, once they wind down, satisfied with their case, to roll on top of Scott and chase a different kind of satisfaction. The only difficult thing is laying herself bare, but even that’s not as hard as it could be, with Scott. Afterwards, as she’s starting to drift into sleep, she feels Scott gather her hair to one side. He places his cheek against her neck. ‘I thought of something else,’ he says, ‘something we can’t tell Marina.’

Tessa hums in encouragement, and Scott continues. ‘This,’ he says, kissing her open-mouthed on the neck, like it’s his point, ‘this is like what we want for our short dance, yeah? Just you and me. Just us.’

It’s so much like what she hasn’t said aloud that she’ll wonder, later, if she dreamed it. She tugs the blankets up and around them so she can keep in the warmth of Scott’s body against hers; keep in the warmth that’s blooming in her chest.

 //

She tries not to be too grumpy when her alarm goes off, because it’s Christmas, and because it’s not fair to Scott, even if it is partly his fault, but really, on three hours of sleep the best she can manage is not active hostility. She mutters a good morning to Scott, still in bed, and goes downstairs to put the kettle on for her lemon and hot water. She’s rooting around for the coffee she’d bought yesterday for Scott—he prefers a different brand to Tessa—when she comes across the forgotten sprigs of mistletoe. They haven’t done too badly for having spent the night in her shopping bag and she’s smoothing out the slender, crumpled leaves when she hears Scott coming down the stairs. She turns to see him shuffling down the hall, sleep-mussed and bleary-eyed but awake enough to go full-on fake surprised when he sees she’s awake and—okay, she’s smiling. She can’t help it. She holds up the mistletoe, meaning to explain that it’s just for her house, for decoration, but Scott sweeps her dramatically into his arms, with all the theatre apparently required by mistletoe, and kisses her. ‘Like you need mistletoe, T. All you need to do is, like—exist.’

Tessa can feel her heart pounding and she wants to cut open her chest, like she cut open her legs, so she can fix this. Scott is her best friend. They sleep together, sometimes, but it doesn’t mean anything. He loves her, but not like that. Not like this. Not like Tessa loves him, with her whole heart; with her whole body, even the parts that hurt. Maybe especially the parts that hurt. She rests her head against Scott’s chest, so she won’t have to see what is or isn’t in his expression. She rests her head against Scott’s chest and closes her eyes, because she’s exhausted, and because she wants to just be here right now, while Scott strokes her hair and the beat of her heart slows to match his.

Not even the most expensive concealer Tessa can afford can hide the circles under her eyes in her family’s annual Christmas photograph, but her smile is big and bright. She decides that it’s all worth it.

//

**Author's Note:**

> Title from ‘Hey Jude’ by the Beatles.
> 
> I’m here for Carmen-era angst even more than the next person probably but sometimes the heart just wants what it wants etc etc.
> 
> ‘[with our short dance] there's a history, there's the ebbs and flows, the ups and downs […] I think we tried to showcase the reality of a relationship and truthfully it's just two people who enjoy each other and are in love and dancing to beautiful music’ – Tessa Virtue, January 2013


End file.
